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Friday, July 07, 2006

Electricity plug points again

After thinking some more about my complaint on plug shapes, I realised that having incompatible plug shapes is actually a good thing. Different plug shapes prevent you from accidentally connecting a device meant for one voltage into a plug point which delivers another voltage. This is an example of the design principle 'Make it hard for users to do the wrong thing'.

If everyone could standardise on the power requirements then the connectors can be standardised, but until then its safer to have it incompatible so that you don't fry the laptop by connecting whatever random cable you can get your hands on.

This is also why some models by the same company have different cable connectors - because they have different power requirements.

What would help is some standard power requirements. If that could be standardised, then the cables can be standardised subsequently.

About Me

I am the founder of Silver Stripe Software where we develop web based SaaS products. We've developed three products - Tool For Agile suite of products for teams that follow a lean or agile process, Tour My App a product for SaaS developers to provide in-app guided tours for their users, and Sequence, a tool to take actions based on user behaviour.
I do a bit of programming, some photography once in a while and like to do some cooking at times.